iMedia: What's the creative process when outlining a movie campaign's digital path? Is there a lot of opportunity to develop entirely new content or is it primarily pulled from the film or storyline?
Caines: There are probably a few campaigns a year where we invoke, for lack of better terminology, the phrase "Blair Witch" and we think of how immersive we want to be. Consumers are at the point where it's pretty hard to fool them that something is real. Frankly, when we build campaigns, we try not to fool them. We instead aspire to what I like to say is a good story well told.
On every campaign, we have the opportunity to build content that's themed to the movie, and the goal as to whether that's the right thing to do is whether immersion in those themes helps grow interest for the movie. Sometimes if you do something and you find out that people consumed it, but it didn't impact interest, well then that's probably the wrong way to have spent the time.
On every campaign we say, "Is there a parallel story that we can create? Is there a character that we can introduce in a long lead way that could be the first introduction to the concept of the movie?" We probably look at the targeted pictures, the genre pictures, as the obvious ones for that. There are certain event titles like "2012" where we have a pretty immersive experience, or "Angels & Demons" where we had some content hidden in the trailer that launched people into another set of discovery.
iMedia: How do you gauge the success of a campaign beyond box-office sales? What other objectives are you trying to reach?
Caines: There are some key outputs that are the same on all of the campaigns that we launch. If we're going to build a site, we're going to look at traffic to the site and how that traffic grows. We're going to look at the discussions that happen as a result of the things we do in our campaign. So, were we able to generate message board chatter, discussion about something that we built, say, a multi-player game?
We look at how shareable our content is that we build -- our original content or viral video or even the trailer or TV or clip content. How shareable is it? Did we do a good job in our media to make it shareable, to make it accessible? Did we motivate people to look for more? And when they did, did they find us? Was our campaign optimized enough? I'd say that looking at all of those indices helps us figure out whether we're performing in the way that we want.
I think everybody in the marketing department feels like they've contributed to the box office. If you ask somebody in legal, "How do you measure success?" They're integral to the process, but probably couldn't easily pinpoint share of box office. So it's really hard to say, "I own this piece of the success."
iMedia: What do you say to the naysayers? Is it really effective? How do you justify the time and money spent on this investment?
Caines: Well, it's getting easier and easier. If you think, probably a year ago, none of us were talking about Twitter. I'd say a couple of weeks ago, Facebook hit the 200 millionth user, and a year ago, they were probably just cresting 100 million. That growth is really indicative of changing consumer behavior.
When some of us who've been doing this for 10 or more years first started, we had to do just what you alluded to -- we had to justify the spend and really make a case for how we could be impactful. And now, every time you pick up a magazine or read an article or see something on the news, there's some new digital trend that's happening that we're chasing or trying to anticipate. As it relates to becoming a fully integrated part of a campaign, I don't find myself having to sell that hard anymore. I think filmmakers are often coming to the table with their own ideas for us to pursue.
iMedia: That's great. Is that a new phenomenon, or new within the past couple years at least?
Caines: It always existed, but there were some filmmakers that seemed to be more focused on it than others. And now I think it's becoming something that's pretty expected. Everybody wants to ensure we're well taken care of on the digital front.
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